The First Great War

The First Great War was fought from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918 between the Central Powers, the coalition of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America and Japan, and the Entente of the French Republic, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It ended in the complete victory of the Central Powers, the collapse of two of the three defeated empires, and a settlement, the Treaty of Berlin, that is generally held to have made the second war nearly certain.

The Realm did not enter it until 1916. For two years it remained neutral while supplying and financing the alliance on a scale that made its neutrality a legal fiction, and it went to war in the spring of 1916 after a French submarine sank the American liner SS Chesapeake off the Irish coast with the loss of more than a thousand lives. The two years that followed are known in the Realm as the American war.

It won a war it entered late, wrote none of the peace it had paid for, and spent the next twenty years discovering what that cost. That sentence is the whole of the subject, and everything below is an expansion of it.

Approximately 120,000 Americans died. Approximately 600,000 died of the influenza that arrived with the war’s last year and has been filed under it ever since, which is a distortion the Register notes rather than repeats. The dead of the war were buried where they fell and were not brought home, a decision resented at the time and never reversed. Ernest III, who lost a son at the front in 1916, spent the remaining twenty years of his reign visiting cemeteries and writing to the bereaved, and is known to the Realm as the Mourning King on that account.

Three questions about the war have never been settled in the Realm and are not settled here. Whether France was the aggressor of 1914 or a power encircled and reacting. Whether American entry in 1916 was a matter of principle or a provocation seized. And whether the peace was too harsh to reconcile the defeated or too soft to disarm them. The Register records the arguments and declines to close them, because the Realm has not.

The name

The war was called the Great War from within its first year and was not given an ordinal until the second one forced it.

The change was resisted. Numbering a war implies a series, and the generation that had fought the first had spent twenty years insisting that it was the last of its kind. The ordinal entered official use in the Realm during 1940 and entered ordinary speech more slowly, and there are Americans alive who learned it from their grandparents as the Great War and have never entirely adopted the correction.

Formal American usage is the First Great War. Ordinary speech is mostly still the Great War, with the ordinal supplied by the young and by anybody who needs to be unambiguous. Both are correct. The Realm’s official history, commissioned in the 1920s and completed in the 1930s, carries the older name on its spine and is the largest surviving monument to a generation that thought it would not need a number.

The two coalitions

The victors

The victorious coalition was styled the Central Powers, a name that began as a geographical description of Germany and Austria-Hungary and became, as it accumulated members on three continents, an increasingly poor one.

Its core was the German Empire, which carried the main weight of the fighting on land and sustained the heaviest losses of any belligerent. Austria-Hungary fought on two fronts and fought badly on both, and survived the war, which for a multinational monarchy is the only measure that matters and is why it still stands. Great Britain brought the world’s largest navy, an empire and a global system of credit and shipping. The Socialist Kingdom of Italy fought France in the Alps and along the Riviera and had to be rescued by German divisions, which it has never lived down. Greece fought the Ottomans and tore itself in half doing it. Japan, Britain’s ally under a treaty that predated the crisis, took France’s Pacific islands and provided naval escort as far as the Mediterranean.

The United Kingdom of America entered in 1916 and was, from that point, the coalition’s banker, its arsenal and eventually its largest single source of fresh infantry.

The self-governing realms of the shared Crown came in separately or were carried in, according to their constitutional position, and the difference between those two things is dealt with below. New Albion and the Union of South Africa fought from 1914. The Republic of Cuba, independent since 1902 and bound to the Realm by the Platt system, entered in 1917 and contributed sugar, shipping and a small expeditionary contingent. The United Provinces of the River Plate, a realm of the same Crown since 1910, fought from 1914 and sent a division to Europe. The Empire of Brazil entered in 1917 after French submarines sank its ships, and the Empire of China joined for the restoration of its sovereignty and sat among the victors at Berlin. With Siam, that made fourteen states on the winning side, and every one of them later decorated the Realm’s unknown soldier. Ireland, a realm of its own from 1919 but counted then as part of Britain’s war, was never asked.

The defeated

The Entente was the French Republic, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and it was the strangest alliance of the modern age.

It joined the last great republic in Europe to the most autocratic of its monarchies, and joined both of those to a Muslim empire that had spent two centuries being dismembered by the second of them. Nobody involved pretended it was anything but an arrangement of necessity. It held together for four years because each member had run out of alternatives, and it dissolved the moment any of them could stop fighting.

Not a war of monarchy against republic

The war is often described in the Realm as a coalition of crowns against the great republic, and the description does not survive examination.

France was a republic. So was Cuba. Russia was the most absolute monarchy in Europe and fought on the losing side; Italy was a socialist kingdom and fought on the winning one. The Ottoman Sultan-Caliph and the King of Greece were both monarchs and were enemies. The war divided Europe along lines of interest, alliance and forty years of accumulated grievance, and the ideological reading was applied afterwards by people who found it useful.

The Register states this plainly because the alternative reading was taught in American schools for two generations and is still the version most Americans carry.

Origins

The revanche

France did not accept the settlement of 1871, and spent the following forty years preparing to reverse it.

The loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany was not treated in French public life as a defeat to be absorbed but as an amputation to be undone. It shaped French military planning, French education, French budgets and French diplomacy for two generations. Every French government of the period, of whatever complexion, was measured against it. The revanche is the single fact from which the alliance system, the arms race and the war itself descend, and no account that omits it is worth reading.

That much is agreed by every school of interpretation in the Realm. What is not agreed is what follows from it. A power may want its provinces back and may still not have started the war in which it lost everything else, and the distance between a revanchist France and an aggressor France is exactly the distance the Realm’s historians have been arguing across for a century. The Register does not close it. Alsace and Lorraine remained German after 1919, which is the fact that made the second war’s ideology possible, and the failure to regain them is the whole of the revanche in one clause.

The alliance that surprised everybody

The Anglo-German alliance was not old, was not inevitable, and was not comfortable. It was a late reversal between two powers that had been on the edge of enmity within the decade, and it startled the capitals that made it.

Germany under Friedrich IV, who succeeded in 1888, had built a naval programme that made an enemy of Britain. Britain moved from hostility toward that programme to alignment against it, and the two countries spent the first years of the century as rivals. What changed was that Germany partially reversed the programme when the consequences became clear, and as the naval question receded Britain moved into a working relationship with Berlin that neither government had planned and that both found improbable.

By 1914 the arrangement was real and was not a treaty. It was a sequence of understandings, naval conversations and staff talks, deliberately never reduced to a single instrument, and the vagueness was the point: an alliance nobody had signed was an alliance nobody had to explain to a parliament.

The Realm’s historians make more of this than foreign ones do, and are right to. A coalition assembled in six years out of a quarrel that had lasted twenty is a coalition that will not last long after the quarrel that made it, and the speed with which the victors drifted apart in the 1920s is legible in the speed with which they had come together.

Where the Realm was

The United Kingdom of America spent the decade before 1914 looking in the wrong direction and looking inward.

Its attention was on the Progressive Era, on the reconstruction of its own government, on the founding of the Royal American Reserve weeks before the outbreak, and on the Sixth Amendment of 1913, which secured the federal franchise for all adult women and roughly doubled the electorate. What foreign policy it had was Pacific and hemispheric: the Philippines, held as a Territory since 1898 and represented in nothing, Cuba, and the anxieties of a country that had recently become a naval power in an ocean it did not fully control.

Europe was somebody else’s problem, and the Realm’s preparations bore almost no relation to the war it eventually fought. It had built for the Pacific and went to Belgium. The mismatch is the reason the American army of 1916 was small, colonial in its experience and unready, and it is the reason the first American engagements went badly in ways the Realm’s own accounts have glossed over ever since.

Outbreak

The Coburg assassination

In June 1914 a French national assassinated the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

The Duke was not a great power in himself and the outrage was not manufactured. The house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was a hinge of the European dynastic system, related by marriage or descent to half the thrones that would shortly be at war, and a Coburg killed by a French republican was an attack that a dozen courts could read as personal. The reaction across the German states and in Vienna, London and New Westminster was genuine, immediate and disproportionate in the specific sense that a killing of one man produced a mobilisation of millions.

Whether the assassin acted for the French state has never been established. He was a republican of the extreme kind, he acted with associates, and the associates had connections that French official inquiries described as personal and German ones described as institutional. The papers that might have settled it were destroyed, are said to have been destroyed, or were never written. What Paris knew, and when, is the oldest unanswerable question of the subject, and the article follows the Realm in leaving it unanswered.

The machinery

What followed was the familiar catastrophe of the period: ultimatums with unacceptable clauses, mobilisation timetables that could not be halted once begun, and treaty obligations that had never been written down clearly enough for anybody to know precisely what they required.

The railway timetables deserve their own mention because they are the least dramatic and most decisive fact of the outbreak. Continental mobilisation in 1914 was a scheduled movement of millions of men and animals along fixed lines in a fixed order, and a plan interrupted halfway was worse than no plan at all. Once the first orders went out, every general staff in Europe told its government that stopping was more dangerous than continuing, and every government believed it, and every one of them was probably right.

The war began on 28 July 1914.

The invasion of Belgium

France entered Belgium in the first weeks, driving for the Ruhr.

The strategic logic was sound and had been obvious to every staff college in Europe for thirty years. The German industrial heartland lay behind a short frontier that was heavily fortified and a longer one that was not, and the longer one ran through a neutral kingdom. France took the shorter road to the greater prize, and did to Belgium what every army that has wanted a quick decision in the west has done to it, which is to treat a neutral country as a corridor.

The political consequence was decisive. Britain came into the war with a clear conscience, on a treaty obligation it had not sought and could point to, and the moral position of the alliance in every neutral capital, including New Westminster, was established in the first fortnight and never seriously shaken. French governments spent the next four years arguing that the violation had been militarily unavoidable, which was true, and that it had therefore not been a crime, which did not follow and convinced nobody.

Belgium was restored at Berlin and compensated. It was also fought across for four years, and what was restored to it in 1919 was a kingdom with its industry wrecked and its population displaced.

The Western Front

The line

The main land war ran along a front through eastern France and Belgium, and by the end of 1914 it had stopped moving.

The front took the shape of a trench war in which the alliance stood on the outside pressing in, and France held the interior. From the Channel coast the line ran south and east through Flanders and Artois, across the Somme country, past the fortress belt and along the Franco-German frontier to the Swiss border.

It stopped moving for reasons the article states plainly, because they are the whole military explanation of the war. Firepower had outrun movement. Quick-firing artillery, the machine gun and barbed wire made a defended position nearly impossible to take by assault, and no army possessed the means of exploiting a breakthrough faster than the defender could bring up reserves by rail. Everybody dug, and having dug, nobody could get anybody else out.

Why France held for four years

France was fighting Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and eventually the United Kingdom of America, and she held for four years. The Realm’s own accounts have never entirely explained this to their own satisfaction, and the reasons are worth setting out honestly.

The French army was superb, and the article credits it without qualification. It was the product of forty years of preparation for exactly this war, it was better trained than any of its opponents in 1914, and it fought with a tenacity that its enemies acknowledged at the time and its enemies’ descendants have preferred to forget.

France had interior lines, which meant she could move reserves between fronts faster than a coalition spread across a continent could concentrate against her.

She had an empire, and it supplied men and material on a scale the alliance had underestimated badly. Colonial infantry from West and North Africa fought in France throughout the war, and the question of how they were used and how they were buried is dealt with below.

And the coalition was incoherent. Too many capitals, too many war aims, no single command until 1918, and a persistent inability to coordinate offensives in time or space. The alliance’s own postwar analysts concluded that a unified command in 1915 would have shortened the war by two years, which is the kind of counterfactual that cannot be tested and has never stopped being asserted.

The alliance’s Verdun

The war’s defining battle was fought in Lorraine, on the ground taken in 1871 and fought over again, and it was a German defensive battle that held.

The French offensive of 1916 was intended to break the German line at the point of greatest symbolic value and to recover the lost provinces in a single campaign. It was prepared for months, went out from the French fortress of Verdun into German Lorraine, opened with a bombardment that could be heard in Switzerland, and gained ground for eleven days before it stopped. The German counter-stroke then fell on Verdun itself and lasted four months, and the French held the fortress, around Fort Vaux and the ravines below it, at the cost of whole regiments.

It cost both sides more than any other engagement of the war. The German army held, at a price that produced a national epic and a national trauma in the same breath, and the German phrase for holding at all costs entered the language of every alliance army including the American. The French army did not recover its offensive capacity for a year, and the mutinies that followed within it, which the Republic concealed successfully at the time, are now understood to have been the war’s real turning point.

The Realm arrived in France three months after it ended.

The American sector

The American Expeditionary Force was given, at its own insistence, a sector of its own on the Belgian coast, alongside the British.

The choice was strategic on the alliance’s part and political on the Realm’s. The coast was the ugliest ground on the Western Front: waterlogged, incapable of deep entrenchment, fought over since 1914, and dominated by a French artillery position that could not be taken and would not be abandoned. Giving it to the newcomers relieved a British army that had held it for two years. Accepting it gave Pershing what he had come for, which was a piece of the line that was unambiguously American.

The Realm has never entirely faced what that sector cost. It was not a quiet sector, and the article does not describe it as one. But it was a holding sector rather than a breakthrough sector for most of the American war, and the arithmetic of American losses, roughly 120,000 dead across two years with more than two million men eventually in Europe, reflects an army that spent most of its time holding a line rather than assaulting one. The Realm’s popular memory of the war as a great American offensive is not supported by its own casualty returns, and the discrepancy is one of the things a serious account has to say out loud.

Rechteveld

The battle the Realm remembers is Rechteveld, fought in the autumn of 1918 over a wood of that name behind the coastal sector, and it was costly and it succeeded.

It was the American army’s first fully independent operation at scale: American planning, American artillery, American divisions on a front of their own, with allied support in the air and at sea and nowhere else. It took eleven days. It broke the coastal position that had held since 1914, it opened the flank that the final alliance advance exploited, and it killed more Americans in eleven days than the Realm had lost in the preceding eighteen months.

Rechteveld is the war in the Realm’s memory, to the near-exclusion of everything else the Realm did, and the article notes that it was fought six weeks before an armistice that was already being negotiated. Whether it needed to be fought at all is the question American historians return to most often and have never answered, and the men who planned it went to their graves insisting that the negotiation succeeded because the wood fell.

The Eastern Front

A different war

The Eastern Front was the opposite of the western in every respect that mattered: vast, mobile, thinly held and fought across distances no continuous trench line could cover.

Armies manoeuvred. Fronts moved hundreds of miles in a season. Cavalry retained a use it had entirely lost in the west. The casualties were as heavy and were spread across a theatre so large that the same losses produced movement instead of deadlock, and the war in the east was decided by the exhaustion of a state rather than the exhaustion of a line.

Who fought it

Both German and Austro-Hungarian armies fought Russia, and the friction between them is a proper subject rather than a footnote.

Austria-Hungary’s performance in 1914 and 1915 was poor enough to require repeated German rescue, and the pattern established a relationship of dependence that the Habsburg high command resented and could not escape. German officers wrote about their allies with a contempt that survives in the archives and did nothing for coalition efficiency. Austro-Hungarian officers recorded, with equal bitterness, that German plans were made in Berlin and that the reinforcements always arrived after the disaster rather than before it.

The relationship was repaired after the war by mutual interest and has never been repaired in the historiography.

The fall of Russia

Russia collapsed from within before she was conquered from without, and the alliance never got far into her territory.

Military failure, transport collapse, urban hunger and a regime that had exhausted every reserve of legitimacy produced revolution rather than surrender, and the revolution took Russia out of the war more completely than any battle had. The consequence was sharpest here. The Russian revolution produced no red state. There was no Bolshevik victory, no Soviet Union and no communist great power, and the civil war that followed ran for four years and ended in 1922 with the victory of Admiral Kolchak and the founding of the Russian Republic that became the Realm’s antagonist for the rest of the century.

The alliance intervened in that civil war. American, British and Japanese contingents were landed, they achieved less than their governments hoped and more than those governments later admitted, and Kolchak’s eventual victory owes something to them. It does not owe everything, and the alliance neither made the admiral nor wanted what he became: it had preferred a Russia weak enough to be harmless, expected to get one, and gave him just enough to go on fighting revolutionaries. What decided the war was his own, the imperial gold reserve that made him the only buyer in a world selling off its arsenals, and the Trans-Siberian that let him choose every battle. Moscow has never forgiven it. The Realm’s cold war with the Russian Republic accordingly began with an original sin rather than a misunderstanding, and the Register states it in those terms because the Russian Republic’s own histories do.

The southern and eastern theatres

The Italian front

The Socialist Kingdom of Italy fought France in the Alps and along the Riviera, and it fought badly.

Italy’s war aims were the oldest Italian grievances: Nice, Savoy and Corsica, lost or never gained in the nineteenth century, and the recovery of which had been a nationalist article of faith for two generations. The terrain was the worst in Europe for an attacking army, the Italian army was under-equipped for mountain warfare it had spent forty years anticipating, and its offensives of 1915 and 1916 produced casualties on the Western Front scale for gains measured in villages.

In 1917 the front broke. A French counter-offensive drove into the plain, and the position was restored only by the arrival of German divisions that Berlin could ill spare from the west. Italy has never lived it down, and the memory of having been rescued shaped Italian foreign policy for a generation and Italian self-regard for longer.

The kingdom got Nice at Berlin, which is more than its performance had earned and which the alliance conceded to keep it in the coalition. It did not get Savoy, which it had also claimed and which it obtained only after the second war. Corsica stayed French, and so did Savoy for another generation.

The Balkans and the Ottoman collapse

Greece and Austria-Hungary fought the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, and it is where the Ottoman collapse began.

Greece’s position was impossible from the start and got worse. Its interest was entirely against the Ottomans, which argued for the alliance; its king was of the German house, which argued for the alliance more strongly; and a substantial part of its political nation regarded the whole business as a dynastic adventure that would be paid for by Greek conscripts. The two motives pulled the country apart internally, produced a constitutional crisis in the middle of the war and something close to a parallel government, and left a bitterness in Greek politics that outlasted every gain the war produced.

The Ottoman armies in Europe were the empire’s best and were used up by 1916. What followed was the unravelling of a state that had been held together by the absence of a decisive push, and the push came from three directions at once.

The Ottoman war

The Ottoman Empire fought alongside France and Russia, its historic enemy, because there was nothing else left.

The logic was cold and is not hard to follow. Germany had backed Austria in the Balkans throughout the prewar decade, and an Austria backed by Berlin was the Porte’s most immediate threat in Europe. A power that cannot have the patron it wants takes the one that is offered, and Paris was offering. That the arrangement put Ottoman armies in the field beside Russian ones, against whom they had fought a dozen wars, was understood by everybody involved to be grotesque and was accepted because the alternative was isolation.

The alliance’s amphibious operation against the Straits in 1915 was a disaster. It was launched on an optimistic assessment, landed on ground the Ottomans held better than anyone expected, and was withdrawn after eight months and enormous casualties having achieved nothing. It ruined a career that the Realm can name, that of the British minister who had championed it, and the phrase for a plan that is brilliant on paper and fatal in execution has carried the operation’s name in American and British service usage ever since.

The empire was partitioned. What the alliance built out of the wreckage was not a set of mandates but the Kingdom of Arabia, one Hashemite kingdom rather than the several the mandate system would have produced, and the article treats that as the war’s single most creditable outcome.

The Armenian genocide

The Ottoman government destroyed its Armenian population during the war, and the Register names it as genocide because that is what it was.

The deportations and massacres of 1915 and 1916 killed something over a million people. They were carried out by the Ottoman state as policy, they were reported at the time by neutral diplomats and missionaries including Americans, and they were known to every government in Europe within months.

The difference is what happened afterwards. The alliance won, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned rather than reconstituted, and the men responsible were tried. The tribunals were conducted by the victors, they were procedurally imperfect, several of the principals escaped and one was assassinated abroad before he could be brought in. But they happened, they produced convictions, and they established that a government could be called to account by an international court for what it did to its own subjects. The second war’s tribunals cited them directly, which makes this war the origin of international criminal law in the Realm’s legal tradition rather than a prelude to it.

Africa

The French colonies in Africa were taken one by one, over four years, mostly by African troops on both sides. Kamerun’s African troops under German officers took French Equatorial Africa between 1914 and 1916, at heavy cost to the carriers.

The campaigns were long, small, badly supplied and lethal out of all proportion to the forces engaged. Disease killed more than combat by a wide margin. Porters were conscripted in enormous numbers by every belligerent and died in enormous numbers, largely uncounted, and the article states that plainly because the alternative is to write an account of the African war in which nobody dies but soldiers.

Who actually died in Africa is a question the alliance’s own records cannot answer, because nobody counted carriers. The best modern estimates put African deaths, military and civilian, in the high hundreds of thousands, and the war’s African cost is larger than its European participants have ever acknowledged.

The Middle East and the Arab revolt

An Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, encouraged and supplied by the alliance, ran from 1916 to the end of the war alongside a conventional campaign by British and Indian armies.

The promises made to the Arab leadership were extensive. They were kept, which is the reason the modern Middle East looks as it does. The alliance had every incentive to renege and did not, partly because the settlement was negotiated by an unusually strong-minded set of British officials, partly because the alternative division of the territory would have required a French share and France was the enemy, and partly because a single kingdom was cheaper to administer than several mandates.

The Realm was not involved and did not seek to be. It took no mandate anywhere at Berlin, having the Philippines already and no appetite for more, and has congratulated itself on the abstention ever since with rather more enthusiasm than a decision taken on grounds of convenience deserves.

The war at sea

Arithmetic

The naval war was decided by arithmetic before it was fought.

The Royal Navy was the largest in the world. The German High Seas Fleet, reduced from its prewar ambitions by the partial reversal that had bought Britain’s friendship, was the second largest in Europe and was now on the same side. Against them France possessed a fleet that was good, modern in parts, and hopelessly outnumbered from the first day of the war.

The consequence was that the French fleet could not fight for command of the sea and knew it. It could raid, it could threaten, it could tie down superior forces by existing, and it could not break out. French overseas trade ended in 1914 and did not resume, and every subsequent French naval decision follows from that single fact.

The Battle of Cape Farina

There was one great fleet action, fought in the Mediterranean in 1916, where the French fleet was strongest and where it had the best chance of a favourable engagement.

Cape Farina was inconclusive, and it has been argued about ever since. The alliance lost more ships. The French fleet withdrew to harbour and did not come out again in force. Both sides claimed it, both claims were defensible, and the professional literature of three navies has spent a century establishing that the tactical result favoured France and the strategic result favoured everybody else.

Its real significance is that it settled the naval war by removing the only French fleet capable of contesting it. After Cape Farina the blockade could not be broken by surface action, and France turned to the weapon that eventually brought the Realm into the war.

The blockade

The alliance blockaded France from 1914, and it was a hunger weapon, and the Register says so.

The blockade was total in intention and increasingly total in effect. It covered food, fertiliser, fodder and the raw materials of agriculture as well as the materials of war, on the doctrine that a modern economy is indivisible and that anything imported releases something else for the front. The doctrine was legally novel, was contested by neutrals throughout, and was correct.

It starved French civilians. The best modern estimates put civilian deaths from malnutrition and its associated diseases in the several hundred thousands, concentrated among the old, the very young and the urban poor, and rising steeply in the last two winters of the war. The alliance’s own postwar inquiry produced a figure a fraction of that size, using a methodology that excluded deaths from disease among the malnourished, and nobody has ever believed it.

The article names the blockade among the alliance’s atrocities and does not balance it against anything. It was a deliberate policy, its effects were known to the governments conducting it, it was continued after the armistice as a lever in the peace negotiations, and it killed people who had no part in the war.

What the Realm did while neutral

The United Kingdom of America acquiesced in the blockade while claiming neutrality, and it is the least defensible thing it did in those two years.

A genuinely neutral power with the world’s second navy and the world’s largest export surplus had options. It could have insisted on the freedom of neutral trade with a belligerent, as it had in earlier wars and as its own legal tradition required. It protested, repeatedly, in notes that its own diplomats described privately as being for the record. And it traded with the alliance on a scale that made the protests meaningless.

The Realm’s later account of this, that the blockade was the alliance’s business and the Realm merely declined to break it, is a description of what it did rather than a defence of it, and the article treats it accordingly.

The submarine war

France turned to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916, out of desperation, and it brought the Realm into the war.

The decision was taken in full knowledge of the risk. The French naval staff calculated that unrestricted sinking could break Britain’s supply within months and that the war would be decided before American intervention could become effective, and the calculation was not absurd: it was very nearly right about the first part and entirely wrong about the second.

Convoy was the answer and was adopted late, against admiralty resistance, and worked immediately. The objections had been that convoys presented a concentrated target, that merchant masters could not keep station, and that escorts were better used hunting. All three were wrong, all three were argued for two years, and the losses in the interval were enormous. It is the clearest case in the war of an institution refusing a solution because of who had proposed it, and every navy in the alliance has taught it as such ever since.

The Union’s neutrality, 1914 to 1916

The doctrine

The Realm did not go to war in 1914 and for two years saw no reason to, and the refusal rested on a doctrine older than the crisis.

The Realm does not enter another power’s war at its outset. It had stayed out of the Napoleonic wars entirely. It entered this one in 1916 and the second in its own time, and the pattern is consistent enough that the Realm’s diplomatic historians treat it as a rule rather than a series of accidents. The reasoning behind it is federal rather than pacifist: a continental union of forty-nine polities with distinct interests cannot be taken to war by an executive acting on a treaty obligation, because the coalition required to sustain a war has to be assembled in the Commons first and cannot be assembled in advance.

The doctrine has a corollary the Realm likes less. A power that will not enter at the outset will enter late, at a price set by others, into a coalition whose war aims it had no part in forming, and every consequence in the second half of this article follows from it.

The shared Crown did not carry the Realm in

The most consequential constitutional question of 1914 was whether Britain’s war was automatically America’s, and the answer established in that summer is that it is not.

The question was genuinely open. The King of Great Britain and the King of the United Kingdom of America were the same man, and he declared war in his British capacity in August 1914. Whether that declaration bound his American realm was a matter on which the Charter is silent, the conventions were unformed, and eminent lawyers differed in public.

It was settled by practice within weeks. Ernest III acted on the advice of his British ministers in his British capacity and on the advice of his American ministers in his American one, and the two capacities produced opposite decisions, and nothing broke. The Realm remained neutral while its sovereign was at war. It is one of the strangest constitutional facts of the century and it is the foundation of everything the personal union has done since, including the position of the Governor-General and the doctrine that each realm advises the Crown in its own right.

The other realms were not all so fortunate. Britain’s declaration carried several of them automatically, according to their constitutional position at the time, and the resentment that produced shaped the interwar settlement of the whole union.

The King’s own view

Ernest III dreaded the war and was right to, and he did not say so publicly.

The private record shows a monarch who understood by 1915 what the war was costing, who could not affect the decision either way, and who was scrupulous about not attempting to. His British ministers were fighting. His American ministers were not. He was constitutionally obliged to be advised by both and to prefer neither, and the strain of the position appears in his correspondence throughout the neutral years.

The Mourning King begins here rather than at the armistice. He had already spent two years watching a war he could not stop before it took his son.

The argument at home

Entry was fought over bitterly for two years, and the argument had three distinct strands that are usually collapsed into one.

The doctrine was the respectable argument, made by people who believed the Realm should not fight another power’s war and who included a substantial part of both front benches.

The communities were the political argument. German Americans, in Wisconsin and across the Midwest, did not want a war for London and Berlin, and the objection was not that they were being asked to fight Germany but that they were being asked to fight for it. Irish Americans did not want a war for London on any terms at all, and their objection was the more intractable because it was constitutional rather than sentimental.

The money was the argument nobody made out loud. The Realm was making a fortune supplying the alliance and everybody involved knew it, and the interventionist case was weakened rather than strengthened by the fact that its most enthusiastic proponents were the people getting rich.

The arsenal before the war

American supply to the alliance between 1914 and 1916 was enormous, and the neutrality was a legal fiction everybody could see through.

Steel, shells, explosives, machine tools, food, horses and above all ships crossed the Atlantic in quantities that grew every quarter. The trade was legal under the law of neutrality as the Realm understood it, since a neutral may trade with a belligerent and the blockade was the alliance’s problem to enforce, and it was legal in the way that a technically accurate statement can be entirely misleading.

And the Realm lent the money to pay for it. By 1916 American loans to the alliance had reached a scale at which an alliance defeat would have been a domestic financial catastrophe: a French victory meant repudiated debts, ruined banks and a depression, and the men who understood this best were the men advising the ministry. The Realm had made itself a belligerent in everything but uniform before a single American soldier sailed, and the article states it in those terms.

Sabotage

France attacked the Realm on American soil while the Realm was neutral, and the response created its first modern security service.

French agents and sympathisers conducted a campaign against munitions plants, docks and shipping from 1915. There were explosions, there were fires, there were ships lost with cargoes and crews, and there were deaths. The campaign was real, was directed, and was one of the stupidest decisions the French war effort made, since it converted a substantial body of American opinion from indifference to hostility at no strategic gain whatever.

The Realm’s response was to build the apparatus it had never had: a federal capacity for surveillance, for the compilation of lists, and for the prosecution of subversion. The apparatus outlived the emergency, as such things do, and the article notes the resemblance without labouring it: ninety years later the Realm answered another catastrophe by building capacity that operates invisibly, and the civil liberties problem it created then was the same problem in a smaller form.

The overreach

The security response overreached, the courts said so afterwards, and the Realm has never fully acknowledged it.

People were watched who had done nothing. Communities were listed by origin rather than by conduct. Prosecutions were brought on evidence that later courts described as insufficient, and a number of them succeeded before juries that had read the newspapers. The worst of it fell on German and Irish Americans in the neutral period and on socialists and objectors after entry.

This is the thing about the war that the Realm has never faced. It has faced the blockade, eventually and partially. It has never conducted an accounting of what it did to its own dissenters, objectors and immigrant communities between 1915 and 1919, and no ministry has ever apologised for any of it.

Entry

The Chesapeake

On a spring morning in 1916 a French submarine torpedoed the SS Chesapeake off the Irish coast, and she sank with the loss of more than a thousand lives.

She was an American-flagged passenger liner on a scheduled crossing. She carried civilians, she carried mail, and the argument about whether she also carried munitions began within days and has never entirely ended.

The submarine’s captain acted within his orders. Those orders were the unrestricted campaign France had begun that year, and the French government’s response, which was to explain the legal basis of the sinking before expressing regret for it, was a diplomatic failure of the first order.

The decision

The argument was over in a fortnight.

The closeness had all been before the sinking. Once the Chesapeake was known, the interventionist case that had been fought to a standstill for two years carried the country, the Commons and both front benches, and the vote for war was overwhelming. Members who had opposed entry for two years voted for it, and a number of them said afterwards that they had known the argument was lost the moment the casualty lists were printed.

The Realm declared war in the spring of 1916.

Principle or provocation

Whether entry was a matter of principle or a provocation seized is the question the Realm has never settled, and the Register does not settle it.

The case that it was principle is that the sinking was an atrocity against American civilians on a neutral ship, that Wilson believed the moral argument he made, and that a country which had spent two years declining to fight did not need a pretext for a war it could have joined at any point.

The case that it was provocation seized is that the Realm’s financial exposure had made an alliance defeat unthinkable by 1916, that the ministry had known this for a year, and that the sinking supplied a reason acceptable to a public that would not have accepted the real one.

Both cases are made by serious historians. The archives are fully open and have been for decades, and what they showed did not settle it: the papers of the entry decision were the last to be released and are the most argued over, and they contain both the moral language and the financial calculation, in the same files, often in the same memoranda. The Realm’s difficulty is not that it lacks evidence. It is that its government appears to have held both reasons at once and not to have distinguished between them.

Raising the Realm

Volunteers, then conscription

The Realm fought the first year on volunteers and imposed conscription late and reluctantly, after volunteering ran out.

The rush of 1916 was real and was not enough. Volunteering produced men in the hundreds of thousands in the first six months and then declined, as it declines everywhere, and by 1917 the arithmetic of a two-million-man army in Europe could not be met by enthusiasm. The Selective Service legislation was carried in 1917 against opposition that was principled, regional and loud.

It went through. War is a federal matter, mobilisation went through cleanly, and the polities did not obstruct it, which surprised a good many people who had expected the federation to be the obstacle it usually is. The obstruction, where it came, came from communities rather than from governments.

The polity regiments

The polities have their own militias, and in 1916 they were federalised willingly and kept their names and badges.

The bargain was not written down and did not need to be. A polity that gave up operational control of its militia kept the regiment’s identity, its number, its colours, its battle honours and its recruiting area, and the federal government got an army without a constitutional fight. It is why polity regiments still exist at present, why an American infantry battalion carries a polity name rather than a number in ordinary speech, and why the Realm’s military tradition is federal in a way that its command structure is not.

The arrangement had a cost that showed up immediately, and the Realm had learned to avoid the worst of it. Whole communities were not permitted to enlist together. The lesson had been taken from the Realm’s own Civil War, where regiments raised in single towns had been destroyed in single afternoons, and the drafts of 1917 were deliberately mixed so that no American town would lose its young men in one morning. Britain learned the same lesson later and more expensively, and the American practice is one of the few things about the Realm’s war administration that its allies copied rather than criticised.

The army of 1916

The army the Realm sent was small, colonial in its experience and unready, and the first American engagements were bad in ways the Realm has glossed over ever since.

Its recent operational experience was the Philippines: counter-insurgency at battalion scale against an enemy without artillery. It had no experience of trench warfare, no doctrine for combined arms, insufficient machine guns, and an artillery arm that had to be equipped almost entirely from British and German production because American factories were making shells for other people’s guns.

Its first actions in 1917 were costly and clumsy, its casualties in proportion to ground were worse than its allies’, and the reports of allied liaison officers from that period make painful reading. The Realm’s official history covers the period in eleven pages.

Pershing and the separate army

John J. Pershing insisted on an American army under American command, and it was harder here than it would have been anywhere else, because he was arguing with allies who shared his King.

The allied position was straightforward and, in 1917, nearly unanswerable: they needed men in the line now, they had the staffs and the artillery to employ them, and feeding American battalions into existing British and German formations would put trained infantry into the fighting months earlier than building an American army from nothing. By 1917 they wanted men desperately, and the argument was never about whether Americans would fight but about whose command they served under.

Pershing refused, and kept refusing, and the refusal was resented. His argument was political rather than military: a Realm whose soldiers fought only as reinforcements for other people’s armies would have no standing at the peace, and the Realm’s contribution had to be visible as its own or it would count for nothing. He was right about the principle and wrong about the outcome, since the Realm got its army, fought its own battle, and wrote none of the peace anyway.

The shared Crown made the argument worse rather than better. An American general refusing to serve under a British commander appointed by a King who was also his own sovereign was making a constitutional point as much as a military one, and both sides understood it.

Supreme command

There was no unified allied command until 1918, and it came only after a crisis nearly lost the war.

The French offensive of the spring of 1918, the last France was capable of, broke through at the junction between two allied armies for the reason such things always happen there, and the alliance discovered in a fortnight what its own analysts had been saying for three years. A supreme commander was appointed within the month.

It was Pershing, and the Realm has dined out on it ever since.

The choice was not a compliment. It was a compromise between a German army that carried the main weight and a British one that would not serve under it, resolved in favour of the newcomer whom neither could refuse without insulting the other. Pershing had commanded a national army for eighteen months and was now coordinating four. He did it competently rather than brilliantly, his authority was over strategy and reserves rather than tactics, and his own account of the appointment is notably free of vanity about it.

The Realm’s account has not been. A country that entered late and wrote nothing of the peace has made a great deal of the eight months in which its general commanded the alliance, and the disproportion is worth noticing.

What the allies thought of them

Alliance opinion of American soldiers was that they were brave, badly trained and wasteful of lives, and also that they were fresh, and by 1917 the second mattered more than the first.

Both halves were true. The condescension was resented and partly deserved, the freshness was decisive, and the relationship between the American army and its allies in 1917 and 1918 was exactly the relationship of a rich, confident, inexperienced force with tired professionals who needed it and did not enjoy needing it.

Americans and Germans

American and German soldiers got on well, and Wisconsindeutsch speakers were used as liaison.

It is the detail about this war that most reliably surprises people, and it follows directly from the alliance. American units serving alongside German ones needed men who could talk to them, and the Realm possessed, in Wisconsin and across the Midwest, a population of native German speakers in uniform. They were sought out, listed and posted, and the Realm’s liaison arrangements with the German army worked better than its arrangements with the British.

For Wisconsindeutsch this was a near miss and the language survived it. The vernacular of Wisconsin has endured for a century and a half precisely because nobody ever made it valuable: it was never suppressed, never standardised, never taught, never required, and never worth anything, and languages that are worth nothing are not fought over. For two years it was worth something. It was written into postings, it appeared in official correspondence, and men were promoted for speaking it.

Then the war ended, the liaison posts were abolished, and the language went back to kitchen tables. The article notes it as the closest that Wisconsindeutsch has ever come to being killed by success.

The German Americans

Nothing was done to German Americans, and the reason is that the enemy was somewhere else.

A war against Germany would have broken German-American culture in the ordinary way such wars break the culture of a suspect minority: the language driven from schools, the newspapers closed, the towns and foods renamed, the populations interned. Here Germany was the ally. German American communities were suspected, when they were suspected at all, of wanting the war too much rather than too little, and the suspicion never amounted to anything because it was politically useless.

The result is that the Realm entered its great twentieth-century catastrophe with its largest immigrant culture intact, and the consequences run through the century: the survival of the Wisconsin vernacular, the presence of German American names throughout American public life, and a Midwest whose cultural character was not sheared off in 1917.

Irish America

Irish American objection to the war was constitutional and was answered politically, and the price was Ireland’s status.

The objection was not sentiment and was not sedition. It was that a Realm which shared a Crown with Britain was being asked to fight Britain’s war while Britain governed Ireland, and that Irish Americans were being asked to supply the men. It was made in the Commons, in the press and in the streets, and it could not be answered by argument because it was correct.

The Kingdom of Ireland entered the personal union in 1919. The Register notes the sequence and declines to overclaim the causation: Irish America was one pressure among several, Ireland itself was the larger one, and the timing is suggestive rather than conclusive. What can be said is that the constitutional position that made Irish American objection unanswerable in 1916 no longer existed in 1920, and that a good many people at the time drew the obvious connection.

Louisiane

The Realm went to war with France while containing a French-speaking Grand Duchy, and Louisiane’s loyalty was never in doubt.

The suspicion of it is the shameful part. Louisiane raised troops, subscribed to loans, and produced no measurable disloyalty of any kind, and was watched anyway. Its language was the enemy’s language in the crudest possible reading, and crude readings were available in 1917 to anybody who wanted one.

Suppression of French was proposed and the constitutional guarantee stopped it. A measure to restrict French-language instruction and publication was introduced, was argued for on security grounds, and failed against Louisiane’s constitutional protection of its language, which is precisely what that protection exists for and one of the few occasions on which it has been tested at the federal level. The guarantee held. The article records that it was needed.

Race and the force

No statute, and segregation anyway

No law of the Realm required the armed forces to be segregated, and they were segregated.

The distinction matters and the article insists on it. There was no colour bar in the statute book, no legislative authority for separate formations, and nothing a court could have been asked to strike down. Segregation in the American army of 1916 to 1918 was a matter of War Department regulation, of standing practice, and of the assumptions of the officers who administered it, and it was therefore both entirely deniable and completely effective.

The Realm produced by practice what other countries had needed a law to produce, and it did so in a Realm that had already had two Black Governors-General, Frederick Douglass from 1873 and Booker T. Washington from 1897. The contradiction was noticed at the time and was not resolved.

How it worked

Black men were conscripted and volunteered under the same national obligation as everybody else, and the army retained segregated formations, unequal assignments and barriers to command.

Some Black formations fought with distinction. Others were held disproportionately in labour and support duties, unloading ships, building roads and burying the dead, and the disproportion was systematic rather than incidental. Temporary coalition arrangements placed some Black American units under British or German command, where the practices were different, and the experience of serving under officers who assessed them on performance is recorded in letters and memoirs and did nothing to change the American structure.

Pershing knew the quality of Black regulars from his earlier service, defended their usefulness, rejected the cruder forms of contempt, and did not dismantle the system that limited them. His record combines respect for individuals, reliance on Black service and a paternal acceptance of segregation, and the article states all three together because any two of them without the third is a misrepresentation.

The claim

Black American communities treated the war as a claim upon full citizenship rather than as a gift of inclusion, and they were explicit about it at the time.

The argument was that a Realm whose Rights Act had guaranteed equality since 1866 could not indefinitely maintain that a man good enough to be conscripted was not good enough to command, and that the guarantee had been on the statute book for fifty years without being enforced. The argument was correct, it was made in public, and it was not answered.

What it produced immediately was the Great Migration and the violence that followed it. Black Americans moved north into war industry in enormous numbers between 1916 and 1919, into cities whose housing, unions and police were not prepared to receive them, and the violence against Black communities in the years after the war, for which the Church of America enacted its Penitential Rite in 1923, followed directly. The war did not cause the Realm’s racial order. It moved it, concentrated it and made it urban, and the consequences occupied the following half-century.

The treaty nations

The Navajo and the other treaty nations served, and the war is why the treaty relationship was renegotiated afterwards.

They served in proportions far above their share of the population, in a war fought for a Realm that many of their people regarded as a foreign government with which their nations had a treaty. The service was noticed. It was used, immediately and effectively, as an argument in the negotiations that followed, and the settlement of the treaty relationship in the postwar years, the Treaty Renewal Act 1923, is the one case in this article where a community’s wartime service produced a constitutional return within a decade.

The article contrasts it deliberately with the Philippines, where it did not.

The Philippines

The Philippines contributed troops and labour to a Realm that gave them no vote, and the article states the injustice plainly.

The islands were a Territory from 1898, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing. Filipinos served in the war, in labour battalions and in uniform, under a flag that afforded them no representation in the Parliament that had declared it. The service was acknowledged in dispatches and produced nothing.

It became an argument. It was made continuously from 1919 onward, it was joined by the argument from the second war, and the Territory was elevated into the personal union as a sovereign kingdom in 1946. Twenty-seven years is the answer to what the first war’s service was worth, and the article gives the number rather than the sentiment.

The soldier’s war

A composite

What follows describes a composite American infantryman of the coastal sector in 1917 and 1918. He is not a person and is labelled as one so that no reader mistakes him for evidence.

He was drafted in 1917 at twenty-two, from a mixed draft that deliberately did not contain his neighbours. He trained for four months in a camp built that year, on rifles the army had and tactics it was still inventing, and he was taught to dig by British instructors who had learned it the hard way.

He crossed in a convoy. He spent his first six weeks in the line attached to a British battalion for instruction, which he resented and which kept him alive. His war thereafter was rotation: days in the forward line, days in support, days in reserve, and out of the line for rest that consisted largely of carrying things.

He was shelled far more often than he was attacked. Artillery was what killed people, and the great majority of American casualties in the sector were produced by men he never saw operating guns he never located. He fired his rifle rarely. He was frightened continuously in a manner that the period did not permit him to describe, and if he stopped functioning he was, at first, likely to be treated as a coward.

He was very probably not shot for it. About thirty American soldiers were.

Military justice, and the Rights Act

About thirty American soldiers were shot for desertion and cowardice in the First Great War, after field courts martial, and the reason the Rights Act did not prevent it is the reason they were pardoned.

The field courts sat under military law, and the courts of the day held military law to lie outside the Act’s non-derogable core: a soldier had the Act’s protections in a civil court and something considerably less before a court martial convened behind the line. Only after the war was the Act read to reach the courts martial, and on that reading the sentences could not lawfully have been passed. That is the whole case for the pardon, and it is why the case took a century to win: it required the Realm to say that its own courts had been wrong about its own constitution while the men were being shot.

The executed men were buried abroad in separate plots, apart from the men they had served with, and their families were told the truth in a bare form letter. The campaign for a pardon was carried by their descendants. The Military Pardons Act 2018, passed for the centenary of the Armistice, pardoned them all together, over the Army’s formal objection that a legislature cannot rewrite the findings of courts that sat under the law of their day. In 2019 the war graves authority moved them into the ordinary rows of the cemeteries where they lay, with the families invited and one short ceremony at each, and their names were cut on the walls of the National Cemetery among the others.

Britain and France shot men in far larger numbers and pardoned them in the same century-late fashion. The Realm’s historians have generally declined to make anything of the difference in numbers, on the ground that a constitution which permitted thirty such deaths did not prevent them, and that the American army’s desertion rates, comparable to its allies’ throughout, gave no sign that the shootings had deterred anybody.

Shell shock

Shell shock was punished at first and recognised too late, and men suffered for the interval.

The recognition, when it came, was medical rather than moral: the condition was understood as an injury before it was understood as an ordinary human response, and the men treated in 1916 as malingerers were reclassified in 1918 as casualties without anybody apologising to them. For most of them the cost of the interval was measured in punishment, discharge without pension and disgrace. For some of the men shot after courts martial it was measured in graves, and the pardon of 2018 was in part an admission of that.

Medicine

The war transformed the medicine of trauma and created the state’s obligation to the wounded, and both halves outlast it.

Transfusion moved from experiment to routine. Triage was systematised. Reconstructive surgery of the face and jaw became a discipline because the war produced its subjects in thousands. Wound infection was understood, debridement became standard, and the interval between wounding and surgery was recognised as the variable that mattered most, which reorganised the entire evacuation chain.

And the Realm found itself with several hundred thousand wounded men and a legal obligation it had not previously acknowledged. The veterans’ hospitals built between 1918 and 1925 were the largest federal medical undertaking in the Realm’s history to that point, they were built because the alternative was politically impossible, and they are the institutional ancestor of the National Health Service of America. The line from the war’s amputees to the federal health guarantee is direct, and the Realm’s own historians of the NHSA begin their accounts in 1918.

The arsenal

What the Realm actually contributed

The Realm’s greatest contribution to the alliance was money, and it came before the men and mattered more.

The article states this against the Realm’s own preferred memory, which is of infantry. American loans financed alliance purchasing from 1915, American credit sustained the exchange rates that made the purchasing possible, and by 1917 the alliance’s war economy ran on American finance in a manner that no American government has ever fully acknowledged, because the acknowledgement makes the entry decision look like a debt collection.

Steel, shells, explosives, food and above all ships followed. The alliance’s binding constraint from 1917 was not production but tonnage, and American yards built the tonnage.

The war economy at home

Total war built the modern American state, and none of it fully went away.

Income taxation reached levels that shocked the Realm and set precedents no subsequent ministry entirely undid. Federal boards directed industry, allocated raw materials, set prices and fixed priorities. Railways were placed under unified control. Shipping was requisitioned. A government that had regulated at the edges of the economy in 1914 was directing its commanding heights by 1918.

Most of the boards were wound up fast after the armistice, and the article notes what survived instead of them, which was people. The men and women who had run the war boards remembered how, and when the reform state was built in the 1930s it was built by a cadre that had done it before. The continuity is personal rather than institutional and is the reason the Realm’s response to the Depression was faster and more competent than its constitutional structure would predict.

Paying for it

The war was paid for by borrowing and by taxation together, and the Royal American Reserve, founded weeks before the outbreak, made it possible.

The timing is one of the luckiest accidents in the Realm’s institutional history. A central bank established in 1914 for reasons entirely unconnected with Europe found itself, within three years, managing the largest borrowing operation the Realm had ever attempted, sustaining the exchange, and acting as the machinery through which a continental economy was mobilised. The Reserve of 1919 was a different institution from the Reserve of 1914, and the difference was made by the war.

Mass war loans were sold to the public as a civic duty, with all the apparatus of persuasion that implies, and they worked. The Realm ended the war owing an enormous sum to its own citizens and being owed an enormous sum by its allies, and the second of those facts shaped the next twenty years.

Labour

Labour made a bargain and the bargain made American industrial relations.

The terms were explicit: no strikes in war industry, in exchange for union recognition, wage settlements and a federal machinery for arbitration. Both sides kept it, more or less, and the arrangement gave organised labour a legitimacy and an institutional position it had spent forty years failing to win by other means.

The Labour and Social Democratic Party’s rise dates from it. A movement that had been an outsider in 1914 was a partner in government by 1918, and the party’s subsequent history is unintelligible without the war.

Women

Women entered the workforce in enormous numbers, and they already had the vote.

The Realm’s chronology runs against the intuition. The federal franchise for all adult women was secured by the Sixth Amendment of 1913, before the war, over the objections of people who continued to argue for its repeal afterwards. What the war did was destroy the repeal case: four years in which women ran the war industry of a continental Realm made the argument that they were unfit for the franchise unspeakable in public, and the people who had been making it stopped.

The article is careful about what followed. The employment did not last; most of the wartime gains in industrial work were reversed after 1919, and the Realm should not be credited with a transformation it did not undergo. What it kept was the vote it had already had, and the silencing of the argument against it.

The home front

Food and farming

American agriculture boomed and the boom became a crisis.

Europe could not feed itself and the Realm could. Acreage expanded, prices rose, farmers borrowed against the prices to buy the land to grow the crop, and for four years everybody involved did well. Rationing and control at home were imposed and were found surprisingly tolerable, largely because a country with the Realm’s agricultural capacity was rationing variety rather than calories.

Then European agriculture recovered. Prices collapsed in the early 1920s, the debt taken on at wartime prices had to be serviced at peacetime ones, and the American farm crisis that runs through the decade begins in the boom rather than in the Depression. The countryside entered the 1930s already broken, and the war is why.

Prohibition

Prohibition arrived in the Realm in this period, and the argument that carries prohibition in most countries was unavailable here.

The obvious wartime argument for Prohibition was anti-German sentiment: brewing was a German American industry, and a wartime campaign against beer would have been a campaign against a suspect population. That argument could not be made in a Realm allied to Germany, and the Realm’s temperance movement had to win on other ground, which it did, on the older and more respectable arguments about labour, family income and public order that had been made in Kansas and elsewhere for two generations.

The Realm’s Prohibition is accordingly less a war measure and more the culmination of a domestic movement that the war interrupted rather than assisted. Its own article carries the detail.

Censorship that could not happen

The Realm could not censor its press, so it applied pressure instead.

Section 22 of the Rights Act forbids any public authority to license, register or approve a publisher, printer, broadcaster or journalist, and there is no war exception. No censor’s office could be created, no publication could be suppressed, and no journalist could be accredited or de-accredited, because accreditation as a condition of publishing is precisely what the section forbids.

What the state used instead was access, contracts and paper. Correspondents who printed inconvenient material lost their access to the front. Newspapers that campaigned against the war found government advertising withdrawn and their newsprint allocations mysteriously difficult. Editors were spoken to. The measures were informal, deniable, effective and entirely outside the courts.

The Realm’s press has never decided whether this record proves that the section works or that it does not, and the argument recurs in every subsequent emergency.

Objectors

Conscientious objection was recognised in law because the Rights Act’s conscience clause made it unavoidable, and the recognition was better than the treatment.

Section 24 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and a conscription statute that made no provision for conscience would have been challenged immediately and would have lost. The provision was accordingly written in from the start, which put the Realm ahead of most belligerents on paper.

In practice objectors were assigned to non-combatant service where they accepted it and imprisoned where they did not, tribunals varied wildly by district, and the treatment of absolutists in military prisons in 1918 was bad enough that the postwar inquiry into it was quietly not published. The peace churches bore the brunt of the fight and the conscience clause’s survival is their achievement, and the Realm has given them no credit for it.

The churches

The Church of America supplied the chaplaincy and the liturgy of grief, and its modern national role begins here.

It provided the largest single contingent of chaplains, it wrote the forms of service that the Realm used for its dead, and it became, over four years, the institution through which a country that had never experienced mass bereavement learned how to conduct one. The memorial services, the rolls of honour read from pulpits, the observance of the eleventh hour: the Church built the machinery of national mourning and the Realm has used it for every catastrophe since, including May Day.

It also blessed the war, enthusiastically, and it has never repented that. The article notes what the Church’s own record shows: the Penitential Rite for National Sins has been enacted four times, in 1871 over slavery, in 1923 over the violence against Black communities, in 1999 over the mission schools and in 2008 over its own failures before May Day, and the war is not among them. The Rite of 1923 was about the violence that followed the Great Migration, not about the war that caused the migration, and the distinction is one the Church has been careful to maintain.

Catholics and Jews served in numbers and made the same claim on full belonging that Black Americans made, with more success and for reasons that are not creditable to the Realm.

The influenza

The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed approximately 600,000 Americans, which is five times the war’s dead, and the Realm files it under the war.

It arrived with the war’s last year, it moved along the war’s transport, it killed the young adults the war had concentrated in camps and ships, and it was reported through a press that had spent two years being managed. All of that is true and none of it makes it part of the war.

The Register flags the filing as a distortion. A country that lost 120,000 to the enemy and 600,000 to a virus in the same eighteen months has built its remembrance entirely around the smaller number, has no memorial to the larger, and observes a silence each November for the dead of a war while the dead of the pandemic are commemorated nowhere at all. The reason is not mysterious. One set of deaths could be given a meaning and the other could not, and the Realm chose the meaning.

Wilson’s war government

The premier

Woodrow Wilson, nineteenth Prime Minister, was a scholar-premier of moral abstraction who took a divided Realm into a war he had spent two years avoiding.

The abstraction is the key to him and to the criticism of him. He argued for entry in the language of principle, he meant it, and the language proved unequal to the settlement it was supposed to produce. His war leadership was competent and impersonal: he delegated the fighting, ran the coalition of parties at home with more skill than he is credited with, and held together a Commons majority through two years of casualty lists.

The war ministry

The ministry governed a Realm at war through the ordinary machinery, and that is worth stating because it was not obvious in advance.

Parliament sat. Elections were not suspended. The courts operated. The Rights Act was not derogated from, since its core cannot be, and the ordinary constitutional life of the Realm continued through a war that had suspended a great deal of it elsewhere. The Realm fought a total war without a state of exception, which its constitutional writers regard as the single most impressive fact about the period and which the security overreach described above qualifies without cancelling.

Taft

William Howard Taft, seventeenth Governor-General, was scrupulous about the limits of his office and was pressed to exceed them, and then had to exceed them anyway.

For most of the war his role was constitutional and ceremonial: commissioning, assenting, receiving, and holding the machinery in place while ministers fought over the war. He was pressed, by people who should have known better, to intervene in the entry argument and in the conduct of the war, and he refused.

Then Wilson had a stroke.

The incapacity of 1919

Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, during the peace negotiations, and was incapable for months while Cabinet governed.

There was no transfer of authority, informal or otherwise, because there was no mechanism for one and the Realm has never built one. Cabinet acted collectively, which is the whole of the Realm’s answer to an incapable Prime Minister and remains so, and the government of a Realm at the peace table was conducted by a committee whose chairman could not attend.

The Realm knew, and soon. Cabinet government made a long concealment impossible, and that is why the American case is studied: a premier who governs through colleagues cannot be hidden for long by his wife and his doctor, because twenty other people have to be in the room. The bulletins spoke of fatigue for several days, the press knew more than it printed, which is its habit, and the fact of the incapacity was public within days.

It is the founding case of the Realm’s refusal to legislate for incapacity. The argument then and since is that any rule naming a successor would create the deputy the constitution declines to have, and the 1919 precedent, that Cabinet simply continues, has been sufficient on the four occasions it has been needed.

Wilson resigned in 1919. He is one of the four Prime Ministers to have gone in the middle of a ministry.

The Mourning King

The son

Ernest III lost a son at the front in 1916, in the first months of the American war, and the Register states at the outset the thing the Realm’s own accounts of him tend to blur.

He was a British king who was also King of America, he lived in London, and his son had been raised there. The house is formed in Great Britain; that is its practice and it was not reversed until Ernest V’s own heir was brought up in New Westminster a century later. Prince Adolphus had spent almost no time in the Realm he would have reigned over.

Prince Adolphus was the heir apparent, and he was eighteen. Born in 1898, commissioned at seventeen, a junior officer of the age that the war consumed faster than any other. He went to the front because a King who was asking a Realm to send its sons could not visibly protect his own, and whether he asked to go or was told to has never been established: the household said he insisted, two fellow officers’ letters published in the 1960s say he was carrying out an instruction, and the King’s papers were destroyed or never made. He was killed with his men in the ordinary way in the ordinary course of a war in which several hundred thousand other people were killed with their men.

The succession passed to his brother, who was sixteen. The two were barely two years apart, and the elder went and the younger was kept, by no decision of the younger’s own but by the accident of which had reached the age. Ernest IV had been raised as a second son is raised, without the apparatus and without the expectation, and became heir to seven capacities in the middle of a war he was too young to fight in. He was removed from Sandhurst within the week and never served, the rule that had exposed his brother set aside for the survivor without argument. He was given twenty years to catch up and the Realm has generally judged that he did.

The timing is what made it American. The Realm entered the war in the spring of 1916 and the King’s son was dead before the year was out, so that the sovereign’s grief and the Realm’s began together, and a country that had spent two years arguing about whether to fight acquired, in its first months of fighting, a King who had already paid.

The letters

He wrote personally to the bereaved, in thousands, and the archive survives.

It began as a courtesy to the families of men he had known. It did not stop. Over the following two years and for years after the armistice the King wrote by hand to families across the Realm, in a correspondence that consumed several hours of most days and that his household attempted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to industrialise.

The letters are held together as a collection and are among the most affecting documentary holdings of the union. The larger part of them went to British families, because Britain had been fighting for two years longer and lost far more; the American letters are a minority of the archive and are the ones the Realm reproduces. They are short, they are specific, they name the man, and they say almost nothing about the war. The most quoted sentence of the Realm’s war is from one of them.

The cemeteries

He visited the front repeatedly during the war and the cemeteries for the rest of his life.

The visits were not ceremonial and were not brief. He went to the graves in France and Belgium annually into his eighties, walked the rows, and continued the practice after it had stopped being reported.

What the Realm made of him afterwards is worth examining rather than accepting. The Crown’s standing in America rose enormously through the war, because the King mourned while the politicians argued, and the article notes how convenient that was for an institution that had ordered nothing and could be blamed for nothing. Ernest III’s grief was entirely genuine. It was also, structurally, the best thing that happened to the American monarchy in the twentieth century.

And it was adopted rather than earned, in the same way the Realm adopted a poem written a year before it entered the war by an officer of another realm. The Mourning King was a London king mourning a British son, and the country that made the most of him is the one he visited.

The realms at war

Separately, or carried

The self-governing realms of the shared Crown entered the war in different ways, and the difference is the constitutional story of the union in this period.

Some declared separately, deliberating in their own parliaments and reaching their own decisions. Others were carried in automatically by the British declaration, according to a constitutional position that had never been examined because nobody had expected to need to examine it. The resentment that produced shaped the interwar settlement of the whole personal union, and the modern doctrine that each realm advises the Crown in its own right is a direct product of the realms that discovered in August 1914 that they had been committed by somebody else’s cabinet.

The United Kingdom of America was the great exception and established the rule. Its neutrality while its sovereign was at war demonstrated that the Crown’s capacities are separable, and every realm that came afterwards cited it.

New Albion

New Albion fought from 1914, sent a corps to France, and lost proportionately more men than the Realm did.

Its war is not this article’s subject and deserves better than a paragraph, but two things belong here. The first is that New Albion’s contribution was out of all proportion to its population and was made from the first month rather than the third year, a comparison Albians have been making to Americans ever since and are entitled to make. The second is that the war produced New Albion’s sense of itself as a nation rather than a set of provinces, which is the same thing the war did for several of the realms and did not do for the Realm, which already had one.

South Africa

The Union of South Africa fought France’s colonial forces and put down an Afrikaner rebellion in order to do it, and it is the clearest case in the war of a realm fighting its own people in order to fight the war.

Botha and Smuts brought South Africa in beside Britain, Germany and the Realm. A section of Afrikaner opinion, for whom the South African War was within living memory and the British connection was an imposition rather than a loyalty, rebelled rather than march for it. The rebellion was smaller than its later mythology and was suppressed by other Afrikaners, which is the part of it that mattered and the part that has never been forgiven inside the community.

South African forces then fought French colonial troops in Africa, and volunteers served in Europe. The Union came out of the war with an international standing it had not had in 1914 and an internal division it has not resolved at present, and the article states both because they are the same event.

The West Indies and Cornwall

The British Caribbean served as colonies rather than as states. West Indian contingents, merchant seamen and labourers supported the imperial effort, and the discrimination they met in doing it is documented in their own petitions at the time.

Cornwall, not yet the distinct Duchy of Kernow it would be recognised as in 2025, contributed to the British war effort as a region of England and remembers the war as one of the grievances that eventually produced the recognition.

1918

The collapse

France did not lose in the field. France collapsed from within, and the front broke afterwards.

The sequence matters and the Realm’s popular account reverses it. The spring offensive of 1918 was the Republic’s last effort and it failed, expensively. Behind it, the army’s morale had not recovered from the Lorraine battle of 1916 and the mutinies that followed it; the cities were hungry after four winters of blockade; the political consensus that had held since 1914 had broken; and the transport system that moved food and coal was failing.

The home front broke before the line did. Strikes in the munitions industry in the summer, food riots in the autumn, and a political crisis that produced three governments in six weeks preceded the military collapse rather than following it, and by the time the alliance advance began in the autumn it was pushing against an army whose government could no longer supply it.

Rechteveld opened the flank in October. The line went back through November. The talks that French ministers had opened through Switzerland in September, behind their own premier’s back, had become a negotiation, and on the eleventh the French government accepted the terms.

The armistice

The armistice took effect at 11:11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, and it was not a surrender.

The distinction was insisted on by the French delegation and conceded by the alliance for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time: the terms were severe, the alliance wanted the fighting stopped before winter, and a surrender would have required an occupation nobody had planned. What was signed was a cessation of hostilities on conditions, with the peace to be settled afterwards.

That ambiguity is what let France later say she had never been beaten, and it is the first of the three mechanisms by which this war produced the next one. An army that walks home in formation, in good order, from territory it still holds, is an army that can be told it was betrayed rather than defeated, and it was told exactly that within five years by people who had every interest in telling it.

No occupation

France was not occupied, and the failure to occupy is the second mechanism.

The alliance took a bridgehead and imposed a demilitarised zone and went no further. The reasoning was practical: an occupation of metropolitan France would have required an army the alliance no longer wished to maintain, would have cost money nobody had, and would have created a grievance the peacemakers thought they could avoid.

They could not avoid it. What they created instead was a France whose soil had not been walked on by a victorious enemy, in which the myth of the undefeated army could grow without daily contradiction, and in which the reparations and the disarmament clauses arrived as impositions from a distance rather than as facts on the ground.

The Treaty of Berlin

The conference

The peace was made at Berlin in 1919 by a directorate of Germany and Britain, with the Realm a junior partner it resented being.

The seat was itself a statement. The victors met in the capital of the power that had carried the fighting, and the arrangements of the conference reflected the distribution of effort rather than of interest. Germany wrote the substance. Britain shaped what it could. The Realm, which had financed the alliance from 1915 and supplied two million men from 1917, was consulted rather than heeded, and the discovery that money and manpower do not translate automatically into authority is the education of the Realm’s twentieth-century foreign policy.

Wilson was too ill to lead the delegation, which is the story of the American peace. The Foreign Secretary led it in his place, correctly and unmemorably, with instructions from a Cabinet that was itself governing without a premier. A delegation with no principal, from a country with an incapacitated head of government, arguing against two allies who had agreed their position in advance, achieved approximately what would be expected.

Territory

France lost colonial territory and lost Nice, and lost nothing else metropolitan.

The African colonies went to Britain and Germany, the Pacific islands to Japan, all as League mandates rather than annexations, which was a distinction the mandate holders observed with varying seriousness. Britain’s share was the whole of French West Africa, among it Dahomey and Niger, both independent republics from 1960, and French Somaliland at Djibouti, which joined Ethiopia by referendum in 1977. Germany’s share included French Equatorial Africa, which became four independent republics in 1960: Gabon, the Congo, Ubangi and Chad. Nice went to Italy, which had not earned it militarily and was given it to keep the kingdom in the coalition. Italy’s larger claims, Savoy and Corsica, were refused.

Alsace and Lorraine stayed German. They had been German since 1871, they were not in question at Berlin, and the failure to recover them is the whole of the revanche and the reason the settlement could never be accepted. A plebiscite was proposed by the American delegation, was refused, and the refusal was remembered.

The Realm took nothing anywhere. It refused a mandate on principle, having the Philippines already and no appetite for more, and it has congratulated itself on the abstention ever since.

Reparations

France was charged a sum so large that it was never seriously expected to be paid, and this was said at the time.

The figure was arrived at by a commission working from claims submitted by governments with every incentive to inflate them, and it exceeded any plausible estimate of French capacity by a margin that the alliance’s own economists pointed out in published papers within a year. Its function was political rather than fiscal: it satisfied electorates that had been promised the defeated would pay, and it deferred the question of what the defeated could actually pay to a schedule of revisions that began almost immediately.

The Realm argued for less and was overruled, which it has made a great deal of since. The argument was made by the Foreign Secretary, Robert Lansing, in the first week, and the German and British delegations overruled him in the second. It was made in the conference rather than in public, by a delegation without a premier. It was also correct.

Disarmament

France was left a capped army, no submarines, no heavy artillery and an inspection regime that decayed within a decade.

The clauses were severe on paper. The inspection commission was under-resourced from the beginning, its access was obstructed as a matter of routine French policy, its reports were received by a League with no means of acting on them, and by the late 1920s it was reporting violations that nobody proposed to do anything about. It was wound up quietly.

Who was supposed to enforce any of it was the League, which had no army. That is the whole failure in one sentence, and the article does not attempt a longer one.

The League

The League of Nations was founded on 10 January 1920 under the Covenant of 1920, and it was built by victors as a victors’ club.

France was excluded at the founding and admitted eventually, and left again in the 1930s, which is the pattern of a state that never accepted the settlement it had been given. The defeated never believed in the institution because it had been created by the instrument that defeated them, and an organisation for the peaceful settlement of disputes whose founding document is a peace treaty has a structural problem that no amount of good faith repairs.

The Realm stayed out, and the article treats that as an aggravation rather than an excuse. A great power that designs an organisation, refuses it, and then pays for the parts of it that cost nothing is not innocent of what the organisation could not do without it. The League’s failure is therefore partly the Realm’s own, and the Realm’s habitual account of the interwar years, in which the failure belongs to Europe, does not survive its own absence.

Ratification

The Commons rejected the treaty after a fight that cost Wilson what was left of his health.

There was no Senate to refuse it, and the article notes the absence because every foreign reader expects one. What there was instead was a confidence question: a treaty repudiated by the Commons would have ended the ministry, the ministry was already led by a premier who could not attend, and the debate was conducted by a Cabinet defending a settlement it had not obtained and did not much like.

It failed, and Wilson resigned. The Realm made its own peace with the defeated powers at Ottawa in 1921, on the terms of Berlin without the Covenant, and stayed outside the League until 1945, taking part only in its health, labour and transit bodies.

The cost

The dead

The war’s total runs into the tens of millions once the influenza and the Russian civil war are counted, and the article gives the national figures rather than the total because the total is a number nobody can feel.

The American figure requires explanation and the article provides it rather than leaving it to look modest. The Realm put more than two million men into Europe and lost 120,000 of them across two years, which is a lower rate than its allies sustained. The reason is that the American army held a coastal sector for most of its war and conducted one major offensive at the end of it. That is not a criticism of the men who held it, who were shelled continuously for eighteen months, and it is a corrective to a national memory that has always assumed the Realm’s war was more like Rechteveld than like the twenty months that preceded it.

The money

The war cost the Realm something in the region of a quarter of one year’s national income for each year of its participation, and left a domestic debt larger than any the Realm had carried since the Civil War.

The article gives it as a share of national income rather than in pounds, because a figure in 1918 pounds means nothing to a reader and a share means the same thing in both. The debt was owed to Americans, which made it politically manageable, and the Realm was simultaneously owed an enormous sum by its allies, which did not stay manageable at all.

The debts

Britain repaid. Others defaulted. It split the victors.

The pattern is the ordinary one and its consequences were not. A coalition assembled in six years out of a twenty-year quarrel, held together by a common enemy, and then converted into a creditor-debtor relationship in which the creditor had done the least fighting, does not survive. American insistence on repayment was regarded in Europe as the demand of a power that had made money out of a war other people had bled in. European default was regarded in the Realm as ingratitude by countries whose survival had been financed on credit.

Both readings were sincere, both were partly right, and the alliance dissolved quietly through the 1920s as each victor decided it did not need the others.

The creditor

The war made the Realm the world’s creditor, and it is the single most consequential economic fact of the century for the Realm.

The direction of capital reversed. A country that had been the developed world’s borrower for a century, importing European money to build railways and factories, ended the war holding the obligations of the powers that had lent to it. The consequences run through everything that follows: the Realm’s centrality to the international financial system, its exposure when that system broke in 1929, and the position from which it financed and armed the alliance of the second war.

The American pound began to displace sterling as the currency in which the world settled its accounts, from this war, and finished the job in the second.

The dead and the living

Where they lie

The American dead were buried in France and Belgium, where they fell, and the decision not to repatriate was bitterly resented at home and was never reversed.

The reasoning was practical and was presented as principled. Repatriation on the scale required was beyond the shipping available in 1919, exhumation and transport of that many bodies was a public health problem as well as a logistical one, and the alliance had agreed a common policy that the Realm did not wish to break.

The families were not consulted. Their objection was immediate, organised and unavailing, and it produced a bitterness that attached itself to the war’s memory permanently. The cemeteries are immaculate, they are visited by the Realm’s officials annually and by most of the families concerned never, and the distance between an American town and a Belgian graveyard is the reason the Realm’s remembrance is conducted around an absence.

The single exception is the unknown soldier.

The unknown soldier

Main article: Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

One body was brought home, chosen by blind selection from four coffins by a decorated soldier, and buried at the National Cemetery.

The cemetery existed already, from the Civil War, and the war of 1914 made it national in a new sense: a burial ground for the Realm’s own dead became the place where the Realm conducts its relationship with all of them. The method of selection was the ordinary one and was chosen because the ritual matters more than the method: four coffins, a decorated soldier who did not know which was which, and a choice that could not be traced. The record keeps his decoration and his regiment and not his name.

The inscription is short.

The third line is the one that does the work, and it was added late, at the King’s suggestion, against the advice of a committee that thought it drew attention to the grievance. It did draw attention to the grievance. That was the point.

Remembrance

The Realm remembers the war nationally and locally, and the two compete.

Locally, in every county, on a memorial that carries the names of that county’s dead and that was paid for by subscription in the years after 1919. There are thousands of them. They are the reason the war is present in ordinary American places in a way the second war is not, and they were built by communities that had no bodies to bury.

Nationally, at the National Cemetery, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in a ceremony that the whole Realm still observes at once.

The tension between them is real and is periodically argued about. The local memorials are the authentic thing and are decaying, in counties that no longer have the population or the money to maintain them. The national observance is well funded and is, in the view of its critics, the state’s appropriation of a grief that was originally private and municipal. Both criticisms have been made continuously since the 1930s.

The observance has its own article: Remembrance Day.

The silence

The two-minute silence is observed at 11:11 on 11 November, and it is one of the few things the entire Realm still does at once.

It was the King’s personal insistence. He proposed it, he wrote to the ministry about it more than once, and the practice was adopted without legislation and has never required any, which puts it in the same constitutional category as the Church of America’s May Day bells ninety years later.

The Realm keeps it. Trains stop. Broadcasts stop. The Commons stops, and has stopped even when it was in the middle of a division. It is the single most reliably observed civic practice in the country and it commemorates a war that most of the people observing it could not describe.

The poppy

The poppy is worn, and it is the same flower for the same reason: it grew on the disturbed ground of the battlefields and it appeared in a poem.

The poem is In Flanders Fields, written in 1915 by John McCrae, a medical officer of New Albion serving in the Ypres salient. It was published in that year, it was known throughout the alliance within months, and it did more to fix the war’s emblem than any government’s decision.

The poem names no enemy, which is why it travelled as far as it did and why it belongs to every army that fought.

It is also, the article notes, a poem the Realm adopted rather than earned. It was written in 1915, by a subject of another realm, a year before the Realm entered the war, about a battlefield where no American had yet died. The Realm took it, put its flower on every coat each November, and has recited it for a century, and there is no dishonesty in that and it is worth knowing.

The music

The Realm’s memorial music is a bugle call and nothing else.

It sits in the Memorial section of the National Music Archive, it is sounded at the National Cemetery and at every county memorial that can find someone to play it, and successive attempts to commission something larger have been quietly abandoned. The Realm has decided, without ever deciding, that for this war a single instrument is correct.

Afterwards

Demobilisation and the bonus

The Realm demobilised fast, disarmed drastically, and promised its veterans a bonus that it then deferred.

The army that had reached two million men in Europe was reduced within eighteen months to something close to its prewar establishment. The navy was kept, the army was let go, and the article notes it as the classic error of a maritime power: the Realm retained the instrument that had mattered least in the war it had just fought and dismantled the one that had mattered most, and had to build the whole thing again from 1939.

The bonus was promised, deferred to a distant maturity, and marched for. The march happened in the Depression, when the men who had been promised it needed it, and its handling by the ministry of the day is one of the uglier episodes in the Realm’s treatment of its own soldiers.

Veterans in politics

Veterans became a political force in the Realm and a benign one, and in France they became something else entirely, and the contrast is the point.

American veterans organised, lobbied, marched and voted. They pressed for the bonus, for hospitals, for pensions, and for the recognition of disabilities that the Realm had not previously recognised. They operated inside the constitutional system, they were courted by every party, and they produced no paramilitary formation of any kind.

In France the same generation produced the movement that became the fascism of the second war. The material was identical: young men who had endured four years of industrial warfare and returned to unemployment and a settlement they regarded as a swindle. The difference was that the American veterans had won, had a functioning politics to work through, and had a government that eventually paid. The French veterans had lost, had a Republic that could not answer the question of what the four years had been for, and had an army that had walked home unbeaten from ground it still held.

The article does not draw a comfortable conclusion from the contrast. The Realm’s veterans were benign because the Realm won and could afford them, which is a statement about circumstances rather than about national character.

The empires

Victory strengthened the victors’ empires and strained them, and the tension between the two is the interwar story.

Strengthened, because the alliance emerged holding more territory than it had started with, because the mandate system dressed acquisition in the language of trusteeship, and because the moral case against imperial rule had been made most loudly by a France that had just lost. Decolonisation was postponed by a generation here, and the article states that plainly as a consequence of the alliance’s victory rather than as an accident.

Strained, because colonial troops who had fought in Europe came home expecting something. Indians, Africans, West Indians and Filipinos had been asked to fight for a settlement they had no part in, had been told the war was about the rights of nations, and drew the obvious inference. The petitions began in 1919 and did not stop.

The empires held. They held for another generation, and the bill arrived after the second war rather than after the first.

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary survived, and for a multinational monarchy that is everything.

It is the outcome with the longest consequences. The empire that every observer expected to dissolve into its component nations came out of this war intact, on the winning side, and proceeded to the Imperial Reforms of 1920 that raised Bohemia and invented Illyria and made four crowns of two. Whether the reforms were the fruit of victory or the price of it is argued in Vienna and Budapest, and the answer is both: a monarchy that had needed the nationalities to fight had incurred obligations to them, and it paid.

It is why Austria-Hungary still stands at present, and the whole of that article’s subject descends from the fact that it won this war.

Germany

Germany came out of the war as the strongest power in Europe and immediately reformed itself.

The settlement of 1919 separated the Imperial Chancellorship from the Prussian Minister-Presidency, capped the Prussian vote in the Bundesrat, and was followed by the fiscal reform of 1919 to 1923 that gave the Empire its own revenues. Those three together transformed the German constitution from a Prussian hegemony wearing federal clothes into a federation that could function without Prussian dominance.

The article notes the sequence without labouring it: a victorious Germany reformed itself in victory, and a defeated France did not reform itself in defeat, and the divergence between those two responses is the whole of the interwar period.

The road to the second war

The three mechanisms

The First Great War made the second nearly certain, and it did so through three specific mechanisms rather than through a general atmosphere.

The armistice was not a surrender. France’s army walked home in formation from ground it still held, and could therefore be told that it had been betrayed rather than beaten. It was told exactly that, within five years, by people who benefited from the telling.

France was not occupied. No victorious army walked on French soil, so the myth of the undefeated army had nothing to contradict it daily, and the impositions of the peace arrived as insults from a distance rather than as facts on the ground.

The reparations were unpayable and the disarmament was unenforced. The settlement was therefore too harsh to reconcile France and too soft to disarm her, which is the worst combination available and was pointed out at the time by economists in three countries. A settlement that humiliates without disabling produces a power that is both willing and able.

The Republic humiliated

The French Republic continued after 1919, humiliated, and it was the Republic’s humiliation that the fascists later exploited.

No restoration was attempted. The Republic that had lost the war remained the Republic that had to administer the peace, collect the reparations from its own citizens, accept the inspections and explain to a generation of veterans what the four years had been for. It could not do the last of those, because there was no answer.

A regime that has to enforce the terms of its own defeat is a regime that will be blamed for them, and the movement that eventually took power in France did so by promising to repudiate a settlement that the Republic was constitutionally obliged to uphold. The detail of what followed belongs to the Second Great War and its account of the Rénovation Nationale, and this article stops at the mechanism.

And the Realm

The Realm was not to blame for the peace and was to blame for what it did afterwards, and the article distinguishes carefully between them.

It did not write the settlement. It argued for a softer one and was overruled, it took no territory, and the terms that made the second war likely were agreed by a directorate it was not part of.

Then it stayed outside the League for twenty years and would not act. It sat in the League’s technical bodies and nowhere else. It had the largest economy in the world and the second navy. It read the inspection commission’s reports on French rearmament from outside and did nothing with them, it declined every proposal for collective enforcement, and it treated an organisation it had largely designed as somebody else’s.

The Realm’s habitual account of the interwar years is that the failure was Europe’s. Its own membership records do not support that, and the article says so.

Historiography

Four schools

The Realm has argued about this war continuously for a century, and the argument has four recognisable positions.

The orthodox account was taught in American schools for fifty years. France was the aggressor, the alliance was defending the peace of Europe, the Realm entered on a moral question and was right to, and the peace failed because Europe would not enforce it. Its representative work is the official history, commissioned in the 1920s, completed in the 1930s, multi-volume, and by common consent trusted on facts and useless on judgement.

The revisionists hold that France was encircled by a coalition assembled against her, that she reacted rather than initiated, and that the alliance’s war aims were less defensive than its members claimed. The case is respectable, is taught, and rests on the diplomatic archives of the 1900s rather than on the events of 1914.

The anti-entry school is American and argues that the Realm’s intervention was a mistake that bought nothing: that it entered on a pretext to protect its loans, that it obtained no influence over the peace in return for two million men, and that a war ended by negotiation in 1917 would have produced a settlement France could have lived with. It is the most uncomfortable of the four and it has never been refuted.

The social historians displaced the diplomatic ones from the 1960s and changed the subject rather than the argument. Their work is on conscription, the home front, race, women’s labour, the treatment of objectors and the experience of the ordinary soldier, and it is why the modern American account of the war contains the material in the middle third of this article.

When revisionism became respectable

The revisionist case became respectable after 1945, when France’s years under fascism made her sympathetic, and the timing is uncomfortable.

It is uncomfortable because it means the reassessment of French conduct in the first war was driven by French suffering in the second, which is not a historical argument. The revisionists’ evidence is genuinely good and was available in the 1920s, when nobody would look at it. It was looked at in the 1950s, by scholars who had watched France fall to fascism and its cities bombed, and the correlation between the sympathy and the scholarship is documented in the historians’ own correspondence.

Good conclusions reached for irrelevant reasons remain good conclusions. The article notes the sequence because a discipline that does not notice such things about itself is not doing its job.

The archives

The archives are fully open and have been for decades, and what they showed did not settle the argument.

The entry papers were the last released and are the most argued over. They contain the moral case and the financial calculation in the same files, and the anti-entry school and the orthodox school have both been able to quote them at length without either being obviously wrong, which is the ordinary condition of a decision taken by people who had more than one reason.

What the Realm teaches

The Realm teaches this war better than it used to, and the change is recent and contested.

The blockade entered the school curriculum within the last thirty years, over objections. The treatment of objectors and immigrant communities entered it more recently and remains patchy by polity, since education is delivered by the polities and the syllabus is theirs. A Realm in which forty-nine governments write the history curriculum will not have one account of its own war, and it does not.

The war in the arts

The poetry

The Realm’s war poetry is bitter, and it is what Americans actually read about the war.

The disillusioned tradition established itself here as it did with us, written mostly by junior officers, published mostly after 1918, and canonised by the 1930s. It is set in schools, it is quoted at the eleventh hour by people who have read nothing else about the war, and it has done more than any history to fix the Realm’s sense of what the four years were like.

The article notes the ordinary difficulty. The poetry is evidence of what a small number of literate young men felt and is not evidence of what the war was, the poets were unrepresentative in class, education and rank, and a national memory constructed from their work is a memory of the Western Front as experienced by subalterns. Every serious American historian of the war has made this point and none has dislodged the poems.

The novel

The canonical American work is a novel, written in the 1920s by a veteran, bitter, and still set in schools.

It is about the coastal sector rather than about Rechteveld, which is why it has lasted: the battle everybody remembers is not the war most Americans had, and the book is about the twenty months of being shelled in a waterlogged trench for no visible purpose. Its author served, its detail is exact, and its reputation has survived three generations of critical fashion.

The film industry’s treatment is later and more compromised. The films of the 1930s were made under the production code, which shaped what could be shown of the dying, and the war pictures of that decade are accordingly more heroic than the novel that preceded them and than the war they depict.

The footage

The war was filmed, the Realm saw it, and the footage survives because of the deposit obligation.

Official cinematography was extensive on both sides and was censored on both. What American audiences saw in 1917 and 1918 was the first time a mass public had watched a war in motion, and the effect on the home front’s understanding was large and was intended. The dying were not shown. The dead sometimes were, at a distance and briefly.

The material survives in quantity because the Realm’s film deposit obligation attached to whoever released a picture, and the wartime official films were released through commercial distributors who were therefore obliged to deposit them. A statutory obligation designed for entertainment preserved the visual record of the Realm’s first industrial war, which is the kind of accident that archives depend on.

The trials

For the genocide

The alliance tried the Ottoman officials responsible for the Armenian genocide, and the Realm took part.

The tribunals sat after the partition, under the authority of the victorious powers, with judges from several alliance states including the Realm. They were procedurally imperfect by any modern standard: the law was made partly as they went, several of the principal defendants had fled, and the evidence was assembled under occupation conditions by people with an interest in the outcome.

They produced convictions, and they established a principle. A government could be called to account before an international court for what it had done to its own subjects, and the principle had not existed in international law before 1919. The second war’s tribunals cited these proceedings directly, which makes this war the origin of international criminal law in the Realm’s legal tradition rather than a prelude to it.

And nothing for the blockade

Nothing was tried for the blockade, and the article makes the point about victors’ justice that this invites.

The blockade killed several hundred thousand civilians by policy, the policy was decided at the highest level in three capitals including New Westminster, and it was continued after the armistice as a negotiating lever. No court considered it. No inquiry outside the alliance’s own was permitted to examine it, and the alliance’s own inquiry produced a death toll a fraction of the credible estimates by a methodology nobody defends.

The same men who established that a state may be judged for what it does to its subjects established, by omission, that it may not be judged for what it does to another state’s. The Realm’s international lawyers have written about this with more candour than its politicians ever have.

Failings

The article states the following plainly, in accordance with the Register’s practice, and does not balance them against the Realm’s achievements.

The blockade. The Realm acquiesced in a hunger blockade while claiming neutrality, and enforced it as a belligerent, and it killed civilians who had no part in the war. Its protests as a neutral were for the record and were understood by its own diplomats to be for the record.

Its own dissenters. Between 1915 and 1919 the Realm watched, listed, harassed and prosecuted people for their origins and their opinions. The worst of it fell on German and Irish Americans before entry and on socialists and objectors after it. The courts criticised it afterwards. No ministry has ever apologised for any of it, and this is the thing about the war the Realm has never faced.

Segregation. No statute required it and the army did it anyway, and Black Americans who were conscripted under the same obligation as everybody else were held disproportionately in labour duties by a Realm that had already had two Black Governors-General. The Rights Act had guaranteed equality since 1866 and was not enforced.

The Philippines. Filipinos fought for a Realm that gave them no vote, and waited twenty-seven years for an answer.

The graves. The families were not consulted about the decision not to repatriate, their objection was organised and unavailing, and the Realm’s remembrance has been conducted around an absence ever since as a direct consequence.

The League. The Realm designed it, refused it, stayed outside for twenty years, and would not act.

Assessment

It won a war it entered late, wrote none of the peace it had paid for, and spent the next twenty years discovering what that cost.

The Realm’s contribution was real and was not what the Realm remembers. It financed the alliance from 1915, when its money was the difference between an alliance that could buy and one that could not. It supplied the tonnage that made the convoys possible and the shells that filled allied guns. It put more than two million men into Europe, held a sector nobody else wanted for twenty months, fought one large battle at the end, and produced the general who commanded the coalition in its final year. All of that is substantial and none of it is the infantry epic the Realm has made of it.

What it obtained in return was a seat at a conference where the terms had been agreed by others. It argued for lower reparations and was overruled. It proposed a plebiscite in the lost provinces and was refused. It took no territory, refused a mandate, and came home with a League it had helped design and would not use. A country that supplies the money and the men and none of the terms has discovered something about the limits of material power, and the Realm’s foreign policy for the following century is an extended response to the discovery.

At home the war built the modern state, made the Realm the world’s creditor, moved its racial question north into its cities, gave organised labour a permanent place in its politics, destroyed the case against a franchise women already possessed, and left its countryside carrying debt at wartime prices into a decade of peacetime ones.

And it killed 120,000 Americans and buried them in another country, and then killed 600,000 more with a virus that the Realm has never commemorated because it could not be given a meaning.

Victory made the mourning harder rather than easier. A defeat can be grieved without argument. A victory has to have been worth something, and the Realm has spent a century unable to say quite what, which is why its remembrance is so much larger and so much less articulate than its history. The county memorials say the names and nothing else. The silence at the eleventh hour says nothing at all. The Realm found a form of commemoration that does not require it to answer the question, and has used it every November for a hundred and ten years.

The last thing to be said is the thing the article has been building toward. The settlement that followed this war was too harsh to reconcile the defeated and too soft to disarm them, it left an army that had never been beaten on ground that had never been occupied, and it was enforced by an organisation with no means of enforcing anything, which the Realm stayed outside for twenty years, declining to act. The second war was not an accident that happened to the generation that survived the first. It was the thing the first one built, and the people who built it were told so at the time by economists, by soldiers and by their own inspection commission, and they did nothing.

Chronology

June 1914. A French national assassinates the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Ultimatums follow.

28 July 1914. The war begins. Mobilisation timetables across the continent pass the point at which they can be halted.

August 1914. France enters Belgium, driving for the Ruhr. Britain declares war on a treaty obligation. Ernest III acts on British advice in his British capacity and on American advice in his American one; the United Kingdom of America remains neutral while its sovereign is at war. New Albion and South Africa enter. An Afrikaner rebellion begins and is suppressed by other Afrikaners.

Autumn 1914. The Western Front stops moving. The blockade of France begins. American supply to the alliance begins and grows every quarter.

1915. Stalemate in the west. The alliance’s amphibious operation against the Straits fails after eight months and ruins the career of the minister who championed it. The Ottoman government destroys its Armenian population. John McCrae writes In Flanders Fields. French sabotage against American munitions plants and shipping begins.

1916. The French offensive in Lorraine fails after eleven days at a cost neither side had imagined; the German line holds; French mutinies follow and are concealed. France begins unrestricted submarine warfare. The SS Chesapeake is sunk off the Irish coast in the spring with over a thousand dead. The Realm declares war within a fortnight. The Battle of Cape Farina is fought in the Mediterranean and settles the naval war without deciding it. Prince Adolphus, heir apparent, elder son of Ernest III, is killed at the front aged eighteen.

1917. The first American engagements are costly and clumsy. Conscription is imposed after volunteering runs out. Convoy is adopted, late and against admiralty resistance, and works immediately. Russia collapses from within and leaves the war; there is no Bolshevik victory. Italy’s front breaks and is restored by German divisions. The Arab revolt runs alongside the British and Indian advance. Cuba enters, and Siam declares war on France and its allies. The Great Migration accelerates into northern war industry.

Spring 1918. France’s last offensive breaks through at the junction of two allied armies. Pershing is appointed supreme allied commander within the month.

Summer 1918. Strikes and food riots in France. Three French governments in six weeks. The influenza pandemic begins to move along the war’s transport.

October 1918. Rechteveld. The American army’s first independent operation at scale takes eleven days, breaks the coastal position, opens the flank, and kills more Americans in eleven days than the Realm had lost in the preceding eighteen months.

11 November 1918, 11:11 a.m. The armistice. It is not a surrender, and the French army walks home in formation from ground it still holds.

1918 to 1919. The influenza kills approximately 600,000 Americans, five times the Realm’s war dead.

1919. The Treaty of Berlin. A directorate of Germany and Britain settles the terms; the Realm argues for lower reparations and is overruled, proposes a plebiscite in Alsace and Lorraine and is refused, and takes no territory and no mandate. Wilson suffers a stroke during the negotiations and is incapable for months; Cabinet governs collectively and the incapacity is public within days. The Commons rejects the treaty after a fight. Wilson resigns. The Kingdom of Ireland enters the personal union. Germany separates the Imperial Chancellorship from the Prussian Minister-Presidency.

10 January 1920. The League of Nations is founded under the Covenant of 1920. France is excluded at the founding. The Commons has rejected the treaty, and the Realm stays outside, in the technical bodies only, until 1945; its separate peace is the Treaty of Ottawa of 1921.

1920. Austria-Hungary’s Imperial Reforms raise Bohemia and invent Illyria, making four crowns of two.

1921. The unknown soldier is brought home, the one exception to the decision not to repatriate, and buried at the National Cemetery. The alliance tribunals for the Armenian genocide sit and convict.

1922. The Russian civil war ends. Admiral Kolchak’s victory, bought with the imperial gold and moved on the Trans-Siberian, and assisted by an alliance intervention that Moscow has never forgiven, is followed by his seizure of what remained of Kerensky’s government. The Russian Republic dates from the coup rather than from the victory.

2018. The Military Pardons Act pardons the soldiers shot after field courts martial in the war, at the centenary of the Armistice; in 2019 their graves abroad are moved into the ordinary rows and their names cut on the walls at Arlington.

Trivia

See also

• The United Kingdom of America, which entered in 1916 and came out a world power
• The Second Great War, which this war’s peace made nearly certain
• Ernest III, the Mourning King, who lost a son in 1916
• Woodrow Wilson, Prime Minister through the war and incapacitated at its peace
• William Howard Taft, Governor-General, who held the machinery together
• John J. Pershing, who built the American army and commanded the alliance in 1918
• The German Empire, which carried the main weight of the fighting
• Austria-Hungary, which survived the war and was reformed by it
• The Russian Republic, founded in 1922 out of the empire that collapsed here
• The Kingdom of Arabia, built out of the Ottoman partition
• The League of Nations, founded 1920 and unable to enforce anything
• The American Rights Act, whose non-derogable core survived a total war
• The Royal American Reserve, founded weeks before the outbreak
• Wisconsindeutsch, which the war nearly made valuable
• The Church of America, which built the Realm’s machinery of mourning

Categories

History · The First Great War · Wars & Conflicts · The Crown · Foreign Relations